Agricultural Boom and Bust: The Rise and Fall of the Littlefair Family

The Littlefair Family c.1910 L-R: George Gray; Jane Littlefair (nee Hart); Ethel Littlefair; Sarah Jane Gray (nee Littlefair); Ada Hutchinson (nee Littlefair); Edward Littlefair and Maud Littlefair (holding the violin).

 This photograph dated around 1910 is possibly one of my favourites. The country scene, idyllic: the family all together, the sweet blonde children in their white frocks, the unmarried aunt holding the violin, roses trailing in the foreground. It is only when you take a good look at the faces, you can see the strain. This is a family that over the course of the 1800s enjoyed the farming boom and the ensuing bust of the agricultural depression and survived (just about) into the dawn of the new century.

Edward Littlefair (b. 1835 with one of his granddaughters)

My focus falls primarily on the gruff looking Abraham Lincoln look alike on the far right. His name was Edward Littlefair, born in 1835 and he was my great great great grandfather. Despite having hundreds of individuals in my genealogical records, unusually he is one of the few who spans all of the available census entries from the period 1841 and 1911. This post, therefore, follows his life from cradle to grave.

A time of prosperity

The Littlefair Family, Co. Durham

The Littlefair Family had a long history in the region. At the time of the English Civil War they were based in Gateshead near Newcastle but over the following century or so gradually migrated south to Durham and then towards Bishop Auckland. It was to a farming family near Hamsterley, County Durham then that Edward Littlefair was born in 1835 to parents, John Littlefair and Hannah Graham.

In 1841, in the first census the family are living in West Mayland Farm. The parents had been slightly older when they got married, so Edward only had the one sister, Sarah, who was about a year younger. The farm still survives today and was clearly doing well enough for John to hire a 13 year old labourer, John Haswell and a house servant, Margaret Willy.

West Mayland Farm, Hamsterley, Co. Durham

Farmers like the Littlefairs were tenants, whereby they rented the land for an annuity from larger landowners. As a result, tenant farmers could become quite affluent, hiring workers and running several farms if they were particularly successful. However, just as tenant farmers could prosper, because they did not own the land, they were left vulnerable in times of agricultural decline.

However, the thought of hardship would have been far from the minds of the Littlefairs during this period. The years 1850-1873 were marked by considerable prosperity for farmers. The agricultural revolution of the proceeding decades had brought with it superior farming methods, whilst rapid population growth thanks to the Industrial Revolution had led to the development of a national market. More people, meant more food was needed and as a result farming boomed. The Crimean War and then the American Civil War caused sufficient disruption in Europe and North America to shield British agriculture from the effects of free trade. This was no doubt a time of plenty.
Certainly the Littlefair family seem to have benefitted from this boom. By 1851, the family had moved 17 miles eastwards to the outskirts of Darlington. The move to Mount Pleasant Farm, Cockerton was a step up for Edward’s father. He was now farming 146 acres and employing not one, but two farm servants to help him.

Cockerton, Darlington, Co. Durham. Sadly, Mount Pleasant was recently demolished to make way for Westpark Garden Village

In 1861, the Littlefairs were at yet another farm, this time north of Darlington in the village of Grange Hill, near Bishop Auckland. Edward by this stage was 26, and a farmer’s son. The farm itself was slightly smaller (115 acres) but the family were still able to employ a carter, ploughboy and house servant. Edward’s sister, Sarah, was no longer at home. She had married John Fenney in Newcastle the previous year.

Grange Hill Farm, Bishop Auckland

By 1871, Edward, now 36, had struck out on his own. He was the tenant farmer for Little Ketton, in Brafferton near Aycliffe. This was a large farm of 224 acres, for which he employed two farm servants and two house servants. He was married to Jane Hart and had two young daughters, Annie (2) and Sarah Jane (7 months). His parents, now in their 70s lived in a small holding nearby called Ketton Lodge with a 15 year old servant. He would not have known it at the time, but things were about to go badly awry.

Little Ketton Farm, Brafferton, nr. Aycliffe

Hardship strikes

A succession of bad harvests as a result of unusually inclement weather blighted English farmers in 1875, 1877 and 1878. Combined with competition from American markets and the 1875 Agricultural Act which provided limited compensation to tenant farmers to improve their holdings, British agriculture took a pounding and slid into a deep and unrelenting depression that would last until the 1890s.

If 1992 had been Queen Elizabeth’s Annus Horribilis, then the years 1880-1881 were Edward’s anni horribiles. In 1880 his father had died leaving £600 (roughly the equivalent of £70k in modern money) but rather surprisingly the executors of the will are Edward’s brother in law, John Fenney (now a railway inspector in Hull) and his uncle, Anthony Graham (a farmer from Whinfield). The 1881 census shows a huge downturn in Edward’s fortunes. Gone is the large farm. Instead, Edward and his growing family (now joined by daughter, Ethel (4) and son Charles (2)) were themselves living in Ketton Lodge. The family have no servants and are only farming 7 acres. It seems unlikely that Edward benefitted from his father’s estate and with his conspicuous absence from the list of executors one suspects some kind of family dispute or disagreement. His mother, was still alive in this period, living in Hull with her daughter and son-in-law as an annuitant. To compound his misfortune, his toddler son, Charles died within weeks of the census being taken.

Ketton Lodge, Brafferton

By 1891, Edward was no longer a farmer. In his mid-fifties, he was a farm labourer, hiring himself out to work for other farmers. His family had continued to grow, to include two further daughters, Ada and Elizabeth (known as Maud) and a son Alfred (6). The fact that he was able to remain a labourer at all is a credit in itself, given that in this period nearly 90,000 farm labourers lost their jobs, many of them migrating to the cities in search of work.

A slow recovery

However, recovery was on its way. The liberal prime minster, William Gladstone set up a Royal Commission in 1894 which concluded that free trade and foreign competition had led to rock bottom prices. Reforms to land tenure in the coming decades, gradually improved the situation for English farmers, but it would not be until the 1950s that British agriculture would completely recover.

Atley Hill Farm, near Northallerton

It is in this period that the Littlefair family move for the final time to Atley Hill Farm, near Northallerton, in Yorkshire. The move down south represents a slight improvement in Edward’s fortunes. He was a tenant farmer once again, with two of his children at home (Annie 32, and Alfred 16, Gardener). Whilst Sarah Jane (now married) and Maud were living up in Hull (in the same parish as Edward’s sister, suggesting continued relations between the two families), Ada was living with her husband, a farmer in nearby South Cowton.

Ethel Littlefair c. 1910

Ethel (my great great grandmother) had moved to Kildale on the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors to be housekeeper for an 82 year old estate bailiff called Edward West. It is here that she met a farmer’s son, Joseph Kinnear Baxter (my great great grandfather). Life for farmers was still difficult and sometime in the period between 1901 and 1911, Joseph sailed to Canada in a bid to carve out a life there for him and Ethel. I plan on looking into his time there in more detail, but my understanding is, that he was working as a lumberjack, and failing to set up a home there, he returned before in or around 1911, when he married Ethel who had patiently waited for him the following year.

Joseph Kinnear Baxter c. 1910

And finally in 1911, about the time that the photograph was taken, Edward was an old man in his mid-seventies. He was still in Atley Hill as a cow keeper with a large collection of grandchildren. His wife died in 1917 but Edward himself lived well into his 80s. He died in 1921, a true survivor of the unpredictable and often volatile world of rural 19th century Britain.